A Hell He Can't Escape
by Mypostblue
Summary: AU, Madge died in the bombings and Gale was in love with her (so all that stuff with Katniss in Mockingjay never happened). Now, Gale is plagued by her memory and craves his dreams where he can be with her again. One-shot.


**AN**: _Just so you know, I'm not neglecting my other story, October Trees. I'm suffering from writer's block and although I know what direction I want to take with it, I just can't get it out. _ _This idea came to me last night, and it started with the idea that Gale is haunted by Madge's ghost and then I went mad with it, haha. I really have no idea what I was thinking through most of it. It would be nice to get some feedback. Also, its kinda dark and a little spooky, I like to think, so just a warning!_

* * *

There's a chill in the air. A bone deep cold that fills your body and has you rattling with shivers all the way up your spine. His breath mists in the air in front of him and he knows that he is dreaming because only in his dreams does he feel this kind of cold.

It's the feeling of death. He's felt it before - when he found her body in the ashes, when he closes his eyes every night. It's the same dream leaving him sweating and trembling, but he takes it gladly because its the only time he feels truly alive.

Every night he dreams the same thing; he knows it off by heart and plays it in his mind throughout the day. It starts with him in the dark. He's in her house, and he knows its her house because the moonlight shines through the old white shutters highlighting the outline of the grand staircase. He can recall the first time he saw those stairs - immaculately white and polished wood, like nothing his Seam eyes had ever seen before. But now, like the colour of his eyes, the stairs a grey. It's eerie and quiet. There's a foul stench in the air, a mix of blood and ash. And like every night he knows what happens next, yet still he welcomes it.

He makes his way up the stairs. The air is thicker here and he shivers to the point it's almost painful, but he knows what awaits him. Dust fills the air as he makes his way through the hall. He knows the upstairs like the back of his hand. He knows where to find her and so he goes to her bedroom - the place where so many memories were made; and there she is.

She is haunting. She is beautiful. It breaks his heart all over again.

Her blonde hair is long and sweeping in tangled curls down her back, shining like spun gold. She stands bathing in the light from the window, awash in the harsh omniscient glow from the moon. As always he is breathless at the sight of her.

Gale's knees go weak. Her plain lacy white nightgown hangs from her body. She looks like an angel, and she is his angel.

Madge is also his hell.

Slowly she turns, her cheeks are hollow and her eyes sad, frighteningly so. If she didn't look it with her back to him, he can see it now; a corpse is all she is in his dreams, but even dead she is the most exquisite creature he has ever and will ever see.

"My love," her voice is strained and dead and although this is only in his mind, he takes the noise and memorises it and cherishes it because he needs it to get him through each day.

He goes to her, stands before her as a broken man and falls to his knees. He grabs her body, burying his face in the fabric of her nightgown at her stomach. She's so much smaller than him and he fears every night that she will be cold and hard like the corpse she is but her body is soft and warm and inviting. It plagues him in his waking hours.

A sob rakes through his spine and he wonders if it has the power to split him in half. It feels like it should. He_ wants_ to split in half. He is broken and is no longer the man he once was. Gale has seen things no one should have to see; he has lived through poverty and war and loss. He hides it well. He focuses on his work and on his family and that's all that keeps him going. People depend on him. He doesn't know why, the one person he depended on has gone and she is never coming back.

Gale's tears are staining the material he has bunched in his hands. He longs for her touch but he knows that she won't, not yet. He runs his hands along her body hoping to stir the spirit inside her that he knows is still alive. He sobs her name. Excruciating choke after excruciating choke. Why isn't he dead? He should be dead. He deserves it. She was kind and beautiful and peaceful._Take me_, he wants to scream.

Madge was the light that filled the darkest spaces.

Gale is the blackest hole of all.

He took the life from her and his punishment is her haunting beauty in his dreams. Lifeless and yet so pure he almost can't stand it. He hates what he has become, hates her for what has he become.

Gale is filled with an all consuming rage and self-loathing.

"I'm sorry!" He screams, the sound muffling against her. He shouts and cries and shakes her but she isn't real and this is a sick dream that his subconscious has created. He has created it. He is the maker of his own personal hell.

"I should have saved you!" His voice is as raw as seeping broken flesh and he knows what's coming next and he braces himself for it, prepares himself for he knows what raw is and raw is the whip crashing on his bare spine. The shrill cries of people being burned alive, of lives dying around him. And he can feel it again as if it was happening all over again. There is no sound of the crack of the whip as it tears opens his scars anew but he feels it._ God,does he feel it_.

He screams but he knows there's no stopping it. He takes it, this pain in his head. There is no mad man yielding the flogger but the pains aren't any less real. It is a memory he hopes to forget but he knows it will never be erased.

When it stops and the pain subsides he looks down to find Madge on her knees in front of him. Her face is stained with tears.

"I love you," she whispers almost too low for him to hear. His heart is pounding so fast he almost doesn't catch her voice over the sound of it.

It is the sweetest kind of morphing she could ever give.

He reaches out for her. His hand moving to wipe her tears but her skin turns to ashes in his hand and before she can completely disappear she speaks, "You didn't save me."

And he wakes.

And it's the most painful moment of it all - to hear from her lips that it was all his fault. He left her to burn in the fire. He did not save her. He must live with it on top of all the other terrible things he has done in his life.

He lies in bed shaking, his blood pumping through his veins. Every night when he wakes, it is different. Tonight he is crying with such anger and fear that he bolts up and leans over to his bedside table withdrawing a loaded pistol from deep within a drawer. He holds it to his head, finger on the trigger. His face scrunched up in such anguish and _pain_ he feels light-headed. His body is rocking back and forth to no rhythm at all.

All it takes is one quick squeeze of the trigger. That's all it would take. He could end it.

If only life was that simple.

He thinks of his family - his mother, brothers, sister. He has caused them so much grief but he knows to take his own life would not be fair to them. Yet every night he does this, considers taking his life. He would give up everything he had if it could buy one more hour with her.

That's when he remembers the body behind him. Johanna. He knows she is awake, he probably woke her up. He can tell she's watching him. Gale hates that she's watching. She doesn't deserve a man like him. A man who can't give himself to her. He has told her time and time again this very fact but she still finds her way into his bed. That's all it is to him, sex, and that's all it ever will be - a warm body to battle the cold, to convince himself he is alive.

If his father were here today to see him like this, he knows what he would think. He thinks it himself. But there is nothing Gale can do to feel any different.

Gale knows what kind of monster he has become. He craves the pain of the night when he can be with the woman he loves. He is darkness plagued by the memory of her light._ For what is life without light?_ Every day is a nightmare. Why does the sun shine when the very person making it shine isn't here?

The hurtful thing is that he knows he is a monster and that he can't help himself. Johanna tells him, reassures him that he can be helped, but what kind of monster lets her console him and then pictures a blonde haired, blue eyed beauty as he pounds into her with such anger and hate?

Gale Hawthorne died with Madge Undersee. In the mayor's house in District 12 on the day the bombs dropped.

He has made his Hell and now he must live in it.

* * *

_So, yeah, I don't know how I feel about this, but it was an idea and I had to get it out. It may not make a lot of sense to you, but it does to me, hah. _

_And if you couldn't tell, I really hate when Gale and Johanna are shipped together so I just had to show the power of Gadge. But no disrespect to those who do, its just my opinion, probably cause I'm not Johanna's number one fan. _

_GADGE ALL THE WAY. _

_and really I just wanted to add another Gadge story because there isn't enough of them._


End file.
